


oh fortune

by magnusicent (evil_bunny_king)



Category: Shadowhunters (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Asexual Raphael is canon YES, M/M, and bonding, and by shenanigans I mean mild existential angst, and snark of course, vampire shenanigans
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-03-18
Updated: 2018-04-28
Packaged: 2018-10-06 22:22:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 7,501
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10345785
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/evil_bunny_king/pseuds/magnusicent
Summary: Clary Fray, Simon Lewis’ best friend and partner-in-crime, disappears from his life two months after he turns 14 and is never heard from again. Simon - deals with it. He grows up. He moves on.He ends up a vampire anyway.





	1. Who Killed Simon Lewis?

Simon Lewis kinda loves Brooklyn.

It’s a grudging love. He’s grown up here: walked the block and a half between his place and the corner store so often he could do it in his sleep (almost did once – and yes it wasn’t a dream, Becca, I know the difference) - he broke a tooth on the corner of 48th and 7th tripping over his own feet and that, he thinks, sums up his relationship with the town.

It’s taken his baby teeth, his earliest memories, and the embarrassment and pain dealt by no less than three bullies through middle school and stuck the memories to the streets like fly paper.

He can’t hate Brooklyn, though. And especially not on a day like today.

There’s a blazing sunset splashed behind the high rises, just low enough to not set alight the smears across his windshield. There’s the wind flooding through his open windows, warm with spring and longer afternoons and sure, it stinks a bit like McDonalds and gasoline, but it also speaks of _summer_.

He pulls up outside Maureen’s place in his beat-up van and he can already see her in the window, gear hauled over her shoulder. He honks the horn anyway. Ms Brown is going to be disappointed in him (and he hates disappointing people, especially wonderful motherly people who make the _best_ banana bread) but he can’t get himself to care right now.

“Hey! Maureen!” he calls, leaning out the window. “Are you ready? ‘Cause I am - and tonight we’re gonna rock-shit- _UP_ -”

The door flies open and Maureen spills out of it in a blue dress he hasn’t seen before, dragging her bags out with her. “Damn it, Simon,” she laughs, struggling towards him. He pops out of the car to help her. “You’re an idiot, you know that?”

“A lovableone, sure.” He drags open the back doors and helps her slide her keyboard carrier in, tucking it carefully beside the mike stands. “It’s all part of my dashing, accountant charm.”

“Sure,” she says, with a roll of her eyes – but she’s smiling just as broadly as he is, and they scramble back into the van, pulling their seatbelts on so fast they lock.

He feels like he’s buzzing. _Tonight_ is the maiden voyage of _Ambidextrous Biscotti:_  the small band’s first paid gig, in a little bar across town. They’ve been through three other iterations, picked up and lost a drummer or two, but this time, _this time_ , it was going to work out. He can just _feel_ it.

The aforementioned Ms Brown appears at her front door as he throws the van into gear, bemused but still smiling. Simon takes it as a win.

“Good luck tonight,” she calls, voice warm and barely audible over the van’s throaty grumble. “You guys will do great.”

Maureen rolls her eyes again, waving vaguely over Simon’s shoulder. They pull away in a squeal of tires - make that a controlled, responsible signalling and merging back into traffic – and then at last they’re on their way, making their own personal history.

“Want to get some warm ups in before we get Devon?” Maureen suggests after a moment. She's practically bouncing in her seat, headlights gilding gold into her dark curls.

“Yeah, of course; just-” He reaches over to the player the same moment she does and she bats his hands away, laughing.

“Think I got it, Simon, but thanks.” She ejects the CD and hands it over, digging in her bag for another. He spares the CD a glance as he puts it away in the case on the sun visor, lingering over the designs scribbled around the edges. _Clary’s Get Up and Go Mix._ It's a guiltypleasure, listening to that old thing.

“Ready?” Maureen asks, as she slides the right disk home.

He can almost feel the warmth of the last of the sunset on the back of his neck. Streaks of pink cloud sketch across the sky before them, disintegrating into purple; the kind of spectacular that settles over you in the moment and you can never quite hold onto afterwards.

He drums his fingers against the wheel and lets the energy burst through him. “Hell yeah!”

The old radio crackles, and they burst into the intro to Panic’s ‘girls/girls/boys’, harmonising as they merge onto Friday night traffic and their fledgling music career.

\--

Simon lost his best friend when he was 14.

Perhaps lost is too strong a word for it. Lost in the literal sense, in that he had a friend, a close friend, a friend who he loved as a sister and maybe something more, and he lost (literally) that friend when she disappeared off the face of the earth - but Clary was still alive somewhere (probably, hopefully, oh god), and she probably knew exactly where she was and so while she was lost _to him_ , she was not lost herself. In the literal sense of the word. Or any meaning of the word. He was confused. It didn't matter. What mattered was:

From the ages of 6 to 14, he and Clary Fairchild were inseparable. Until they weren’t.

The last time he heard from her was during a phone call in the middle of the night, her voice hushed and hoarse from tears as she whispered into the phone, trying to keep her voice down.

 _“Simon,”_ she’d said the moment he’d picked up, voice shaking so much he could barely understand her. _“Simon, we have to-”_

“Clary?” he’d murmured, still half-asleep but steadily waking at the pain in her voice. It’d felt like his stomach was plummeting to his toes. “Clary, what’s-”

 _“No Simon, please, listen, just listen-”_ she’d taken another shaky breath and he’d listened, as she’d asked, he’d waited, ear plastered to the phone and feet swung out of bed. _“Simon, I have to leave town. My mom and I - we’re not coming back. I can’t tell you why – I don’t really understand– but I do know we have to go, and so that means – that means-”_

Words forced themselves through his silence, bursting from his chest. _“But why, Clary? I don’t understand? What’s going on-?”_

Clary was crying now, soft, sad sounds that were muted by the telephone and made his heart break. _“I’m sorry,”_ she sobbed _. “I’m sorry- I’ll miss you, you are my best friend, and I love you, and I’m going to miss you so much-”_

_“Clary-!”_

He was crying too, now, big, fat, hot tears that streamed down his cheeks and dripped off of his chin. He heard his mother shift in the next room. He heard doors opening and closing on Clary’s end, and her sharp intake of breath- and her final whisper before the line fell dead.

_“I’ll never forget you.”_

He’d scrambled out of bed and jammed his feet into his shoes. He was in his pajamas, he was 14, he had never gone out on his own this late before, but he tore out of the house and down the street, ducking into the short-cut to hers that he’d been using since they were 10.

He doesn’t remember much about those five blocks. What he remembers is the sirens and light, the smoke billowing from Clary’s mother’s apartment and the police officer that held him back, that took his shoulders in her hands, forcing him to look at her.

“Everything’s going to be okay, alright, kid?”

In the flashing lights she’d seemed ghostly and unreal, the blue washing over her features and igniting the brown of her eyes before falling into muted, amber shadow again.

“It’s going to be alright. What’s your name? Where’re your parents?”

“Clary,” was the only word he could get out, his gaze slipping back to the burning apartment, the flames licking the windows.

The officer seemed to understand, glancing back at the building before squeezing his shoulder to get his attention again. “There was no one inside at the time, okay? I’m sure your friend, Clary, I’m sure she’s alright. We’ve had people go in, and there’s no one left inside. It’s going to be alright.”

He’d nodded, and then nodded again, half-comprehendingly, and the Officer had sat him in the back of her cop car. She gave him a blanket, and a hot drink, and he’d sat there and drank it as the firefighters had contained and eventually extinguished the blaze, water dripping from the shattered rafters.

Her mum and sister had appeared not too much later. He was chivvied home to chidings and worry, their questions met with muted silence until they eventually stopped entirely.

He’d called Clary back, that night and each one following for the next week, until the endless ringing gave way to a ‘number disconnected’ message.

Simon lost his best friend a month after his 14th birthday to fire and… he had no idea what and he’s never seen or heard from her since, no matter how much he’s looked.

It was kind of traumatising.

The fire was ruled as an accident: gas leak from a faulty pilot light, sparked by a nearby lamp. The house was empty: the family had moved out the previous morning; the insurance paperwork was handled by a lawyer - there was no sign of foul play of any sort and Simon even wondered if he’d dreamed up the phone call entirely – if he’d just woken up with the kind of freak intuition that happened to be true, once in a million times.

He never heard from Clary again.

He grew up. He grew older. He moved on.

 

-

 

_He grew older._

 

-

 

The gig _rocked._

They pour out of the bar into the cool NY evening afterwards. The pink fuzz of electric signs light the dark, casting shadowed grotesques across the pavement. Simon can't keep the smile from his face. He runs his fingers through his hair, looking back at the bar’s blacked out entrance. He does it again, for good measure.

He feels like he could vibrate through the floor.

“Did that just happen?” he manages.

Maureen snorts.

“There were like, three people there,” she reminds him, bumping his shoulder but she’s smiling as broadly as he is and so he considers her comment moot.

“Devon?” he tries instead. “Buddy old pal? Back me up?”

Devon Chen, their final band member, a lanky, dark haired Econ major with a mean bass rhythm, swans past them for the van with Simon’s keys in the air.

“Who’s up for _clubbing_?” he calls over his shoulder instead.

It's late. They probably won't be able to get drinks even if they do get in (Maureen’s still 20) and they still have the equipment, and the van. This is not a good idea.

Simon heaves his guitar higher up his shoulder as Maureen cracks and gives a whoop.

 _“Hell to the yeah_.”

 

-

 

 _Pandemonium_ splashes the sidewalk with light and colour at the edge of the warehouse district, it’s large factory door crooked wide, strobe lights licking across the brickwork. Simon can feel the bass line as they approach, throbbing through his shoes. They’ve abandoned the van and the equipment a block away, down the side of the bar they’d played at earlier. He’s not entirely sure that was legal, but they won’t get towed. Probably. They aren’t going to stay long anyway.

They get in without too much difficulty and the inside is as grandiose as the outside: the old struts that held the factory together arch overhead, shuddering dust occasionally onto the dancers below and offset by purple velvet drapes and faux-leather sofas. _Pandemonium_ is small, unique but quirky. The music is even half-decent, most of the time.

They push their way through the crowd towards the back and Maureen snags one of the sofas, sinking down into it with a sigh.

“So I guess I’m driver?”

They all look pointedly down at the huge Xs drawn on the backs of her hands and she kicks her feet irritably onto the table.

“Two months, boys. Then the drinks? Are on you.”

Devon just laughs, tossing her the keys, and Simon taps his fingers against his wallet.

“I’ll just go get us some drinks, then? For those of us who _are_ drinking?”

Maureen flips him off as he turns to head back to the bar and it’s totally worth it.

The crowd thickens around the bar, unsurprisingly, and it takes a good five minutes before Simon manages to shuffle his way forward, snagging a rare barstool for his trouble. The bartender still manages not to see him and so he stays there a while, trying to ignore the way he’s put his elbow in a puddle of beer. A little while longer and a beautiful woman slides into the seat beside him, her long, dark hair cascading down the back of a well-fitting red dress.

She tips her head back and gives a sigh. Simon tries not to stare.

He fails.

He blinks himself out of it, jerking back to try and catch the barman’s eye again, but not before the woman’s gaze flicks to his.

He sees her watching him in the bar mirror. She’s smiling, red lips curling at the corners.

“And what’s your name?” she asks. Her voice is low, bemused.

He looks at her, startled, and then gives a completely undignified laugh. “It’s - Lewis.” He sticks his hand out and it’s awkward, given the little space between them. “Simon Lewis.”

Her smile grows wider, enough to show a glint of perfect teeth, and although she doesn’t take his hand she doesn’t abandon this sinking ship either. That, perhaps, should’ve been the first clue. There’s no way that could’ve come off as charming.

“Well, Simon,” she says, and he likes how she says it. There’s this, warmth to her voice, he thinks. And there’s something about her eyes. Not so much the colour of them, or depth, no ‘windows to the soul’ crap, but the way the fairy lights over the bar catch in them. Like fireflies in a jar. “You can buy me a drink. And one for yourself, too.”

“Sure,” he says, and when she signals the barman he actually comes, for once.

They make it back through the crowd. They go to a curtained alcove at the back of the club.

 

-

 

At one point the woman’s in his lap, her voice in his ear, her fingers curled in the hair around the back of his head and she’s telling him things, things he doesn’t really believe and can’t really hold onto. The words drip like honey through the fog of his thoughts and away again.

 _There are empires that have grown and died beneath the stars,_  she says. _There are worlds between worlds that you haven’t imagined, my sweet, that you can’t even dream._

 _Now drink_ , she says, and he does, with hands that feel too big and her mouth finds the corner of his jaw and then his neck.

He likes the way she touches him. She’s cold, her fingers chilled like she’s been outside without gloves, but she’s warming, slowly, he thinks, as her hand slides to his shoulder, stabilising him.

He breathes and he drinks.

He doesn’t go to find his friends. He doesn’t think about his friends.

 

-

 

He doesn’t know how long has passed - it feels like an eternity, that they’re a world away - but then something changes.

The fingers in his hair still. The words stop, the woman’s eyes growing large and thoughtful - and then she’s gone, as if she was never there, his arms raised to thin air.

He gets to his feet - too fast, the world spins, prickling at the edges - and staggers forward, pushing out of the curtains back onto the main floor.

“Hey,” he calls, and it sounds slurred. He sounds drunk - he probably is drunk. He’s not sure how much he’s had. “Where are - where’d you go?”

He wants to call her name, but he can’t remember it. He’s not sure if she’d told him. His chest feels heavy and his head feels full of cotton wool. He finds his feet and takes one step, and then another, but he can’t find her and the music is - it’s too loud and it’s everywhere, pouring in through his ears and filling him like an empty jug.

There’s a crowd still dancing on the floor, sporadically lit by the strobe lights, but something is wrong - suddenly he knows it.

Flickers of movement in the corner of his eye. Shadows that aren’t shadows, that move and then are gone, and he gets a prickling of something, some sort of awareness crawling up the back of his neck, breaking through the numbness he hadn’t realised he’d been feeling.

Shadows and flickering lights. People in the dark, in the worlds between worlds.

A glass shatters, and the first person screams.

 

-

 

He remembers: nightmares. Heat bursting down the center of his chest. A man’s face peeling open in four quarters like a cryptid version of the plant in the little shop of horrors, and a flash of red hair in a strobe light - a face older than he remembers, but as memorable as his own.

He remembers: _Clary_.

He spins after her. His head feels fuzzy and his feet move wrong, and there are bodies around him, too many bodies, people running between him until he can't see her anymore.

He reaches out. He can’t reach far enough.

 

-

  
Simon Lewis' last living thought is of cats.

 

-

 

He comes back to himself on his knees in what he quickly realises is a hole, a hole in a _graveyard_ , in the _middle of the night_ , with blood and grit in his mouth.

He spits. He must’ve - must’ve bitten his tongue or something - he’s not sure what happened, or how he got here. He sinks his hands back into the dirt and looks down at himself again, and there are rips in his clothing. Actually _rip_ isn’t quite a strong enough word for it - his shirt is more hole than fabric now, torn gaping across his chest and parts of it are tacky, heavy, with - something he doesn’t want to think about right now.

He’s sat in a hole in a graveyard.

He’s the one that dug it, he thinks, staring at his dirty hands, and the dirt forced under his fingernails.

His throat suddenly throbs itself into his awareness, a sharp, dry pain clicking there as he tries to swallow. He gasps - or he tries to: the sound is too strangled to really sound like anything - and then there are footsteps, rustling closer through the grass.

A figure crouches down before him. Simon sees dark jeans, black leather, and features washed grey by moonlight, as impassive as carved stone.

A well-maintained hand offers him a thermos.

“Drink,” the young man says, reasonably.


	2. Chapter 2

Stiletto heels tap across _Pandemonium’s_ hard-stone floors, loud against the dim wail of approaching sirens and the mechanical sweeping of the lights. Coats, bags, and abandoned drinks lie strewn across the floors and furniture. Strobe lights catch on the bodies slumped by the back wall.

The footsteps angle perfunctorily around a purse and it is then that a figure stirs, rising from a crouch amongst the bodies.

“I thought I said-” Magnus Bane begins, his voice strained to the point of anger, but when he twists and glimpses the woman he stops. After a moment, he manages a startled laugh.

Magic pours uselessly from his hands into the young woman before him, glowing a wan blue as it hovers over the holes in her chest. She hasn't stirred once since he’d pulled her into his lap. It’s a scene he’s been part of before, and hoped he’d never repeat.

“Camille,” he says, as the woman continues forward. His magic stutters, once, and then he draws his hands away, letting it stop entirely. He was too late, anyway.

The pleasantry is thin, and Camille Belcourt gives him a lazy, red-lipped smile. "Magnus,” she greets, magnanimously. 

She reaches the closest body, an unconscious young man, and nudges his head with the point of her shoe. “Looks like I missed a party. What _have_ you been doing since I saw you last?”

“Considering it's been a century-” He wipes his hands reflexively on his knees, not looking at her, and turns to the next body. The angel-blooded may not care about the lives of these mundanes, but Magnus would at least _try_ to save them. There was an irony in that, he supposed. “It's quite the tale. Sadly for you, I don't have the time for it.”

She laughs, in the same delighted way he used to envy. “So _charming_. Well. Don't worry, I won't hold you long. I was just… curious.”

She straightens and tilts her head back, her eyelids fluttering shut as she takes an unnecessary breath.

Her eyes snap open again. She looks surprised.

“Demons? Angel brats-? Magnus, my, my-”

Magnus bends over a boy bleeding out through the holes in his chest, crumpled in the corner. He looks so _young._  The ruined meat rolls back over his torn clothing but Magnus casts his magic over him anyway. 

The quick snap of heels and then Camille is crouching low over the boy beside him, suddenly intent. She cocks her head in a way too sharp to be human.

“Interesting,” she murmurs, and then before Magnus can protest she reaches down and grips the boy’s jaw, a red nailed finger pressed into his neck.

She takes another sharp, unnecessary, breath, and taps her nail against the boy's neck.

“This is my property,” she says through a toothed smile.

His magic changes, searching, and then he finds the old magic working through the boy's veins, pumping through his failing heart. _Fledgling._

His hands pull away, magic stuttering. "Did _you_ -”

“Did _I_ ?” She snorts, dismissing the recrimination in his tone. “A _demon_ ended whatever pathetic mortal life it had. It's death _,_ though; that belongs to me."

She pauses, as if considering the boy further, sharp gaze slipping over the broken form.

“I’ll do my duty by the accords. Find the - _requisite paperwork._ ” She twists the boy’s head, too sharp nails digging into his cheeks. “Unless you’d rather we dispose of it entirely?”

Magnus’ mouth twists.

She laughs and draws herself to her full height. The strobes sketch stripes across her skin tight dress, drawing stars from the necklace heavy around her neck. Sapphire, not a ruby.

“Pleasure as always, Magnus,” she says, and takes out her mobile.

 

-

 

“Who are you?” Simon croaks to his attacker, scrambling backwards. His trainers scuff uselessly in the dirt and crap strewn across his _grave_ before they catch and then he's slamming back against a tombstone _._ “ _What in g- gu-”_

The pain seizes in his throat and he bows forward as he begins to cough, thick, heavy bursts that feel like he's dislodging sand from his lungs. The smart shoes step into his line of sight again. Oh g-- g- he's going to get murdered right here and now and he isn't even-

“I'm Jewish,” he manages when he can breathe again, pressing himself back against the very cross-like tombstone. “Could you at least - bury me somewhere _else_ when you're done stabbing me - or - or poisoning _me_ because hell, my throat feels like it's on _fire_ -”

There's movement and then the man is crouched on his heels so they can look eye to eye, a distasteful expression twisting his lips.

“ _I_ haven't done anything to you," he says. "Nor will I. Besides." He pushes the thermos into the freshly turned dirt and taps those too-long nails on the lid again, drawling out his next words as if stating a matter of fact. "The damage has already been done.”

_Damage._

Simon chokes.

“ _Damag-_ ” He trips over the word, unable to even get it out, and presses himself back against the hard stone. Oh _sweet_ _god._ “What – what did you do to me? Am I _dying_? Am I going to die-?”

He runs through some implausible escape plans like how maybe he could make a run for it; maybe it’s just one man and he could wriggle away and get to a hospital before whatever- whatever they did is-

The young man just looks at him, with the same calm, unreadable placidity he’s maintained the whole time.

Simon is in a world of fucked up. An astronomical kind of fucked up.

“No,” he says, so simply. “Because as I said, the damage is already done. Whatever life you had before is over.” He seems to pause, as if assessing him, but apparently somehow oblivious or simply ignoring the way Simon was _absolutely freaking out right now_. And then he drops the bombshell: “You’re a vampire now.”

The graveyard makes more sense now.

“Vampire-?!” Simon begins to say, to laugh – of course he got the serial killer who thought he was in a b-movie – but the man _is_ moving now: he pulls back his sleeve with a brisk efficiency, ignoring Simon's flinch, and raises his wrist to his lips-

And Simon –

Simon tastes something, somehow.

He hears the fleshy sound of skin tearing. He tastes blood, as if it were heavy in his mouth and something in him goes - blank, hot

hungry.

The next thing he knows, he’s lunging across the short space between them and being wrestled easily, controllably, to the ground. His teeth suddenly feel too big and too many for his mouth, his throat burning, and when he realises that _he was the one who moved_ , who’s still moving, he forces himself limp.

“What-” he manages to choke out. He says it to the dirt he’s being pressed face first into.

“Like I said,” the calm voice murmurs above him. The man's grip is cold and inhumanly strong - but he is also closer now, and without pressure the wound on his wrist is bleeding freely, running down his fingers. Simon can almost _smell it;_ he feels the way it seeps into the back of his shirt, the way it sticks to his skin, heavy and warm _._

A thought passes: _Wasted_. His throat _burns_.

“Not-” _possible_ is what he wants to say, because he must be tripping on something; he’s been drugged and it’s made him suggestible– _bloodthirsty?_ – but the pain in his throat is too much and so he gasps in a breath instead, head twisted to avoid inhaling dirt. He doesn’t really succeed, but the grips around his arms loosen. He’s allowed to rise onto his knees, hands braced shakily into the dirt.

The thermos is shoved under his nose again.

“Drink,” the man repeats, above him. “It'll help.”

The lid is screwed off this time and he feels himself go strangely out of control again at the smell of it, like a spectator in his body as he seizes the thermos and tips the warm liquid down his throat.

He doesn’t know if he’s ever tasted anything better in his life. It tastes - like the deliciousness of cold water on a hot day; like it’s exactly what he’s needed, like it’s all that he’s needed.

He’s licking the blood off of his fingers when he comes back to himself.

Blood. Because he’s a vampire now.

He lets the thermos fall from his grip and feels for the absent pulse in his neck, fingers digging beneath his chin.

 _Vampire_.

He can feel the young man’s hand around his bicep. It’s dead weight, as cold as the stone behind him.

He can’t - he can’t.

He runs.

 

-

 

“You did this to me.”

“I did not.”

The young man - Raphael, he’s learned, his name is Raphael - kicks back casually against Simon’s chest of drawers and levels him with another of his long, unnerving looks. He’s anachronistic amidst the organised chaos of Simon bedroom. He's too still, and dressed too finely (who wears a tailored suit to a graveyard?), and a coldness seems to seep into the air around him, smelling faintly of growing things.

Simon holds his gaze for a good moment before he gives up and sits heavily on the bed. He presses his palms into his eyes.

“If it wasn’t you,” he tries again, looking up and trying to keep his voice steady. "Then who was it? Or - what? I don’t even know how this works - I can’t even _remember_ what happened.”

The books from his windowsill are scattered across the floor, dusted liberally with broken glass. Raphael had knocked them over when he’d broken in Simon’s window and stopped Simon from murdering his own mother.

His ‘fangs’ still press against his lower lip. He tries not to think about them.

“Will she be okay?” he asks.

Raphael, still watching him unerringly with those dark, unreadable eyes from across the room, nods.

Simon interlocks his hands in his lap and pulls them apart again, not quite able to meet Raphael's gaze.

“What exactly did you do to her?”

It's not that he trusts Raphael, exactly. He can’t really believe what’s happening to him, let alone  _how_ , but after he’d gotten home - after he’d ran there, faster than was physically possible and rebounding off the street corners - his mom had caught him on the threshold to his room and dragged him into a hug so tight he felt his ribs creak. Her breath had been hot against his shoulder, her hair grazing his nose. She’d been so warm. She’d felt so much like _home_.

And then he’d breathed in the heat of her skin.

It’d only been the shatter of glass that had broken his attention; Raphael’s hand on his shoulder, strong and firm, that had stopped him from tearing into thin skin of her neck.

“Incanto,” Raphael says back in the present, in answer to his question. He’s examining some of the items on his dresser, now, and he twists a rough hewn dog - Simon’s failed attempt at carpentry - between his fingers. “It’s a form of hypnotism. Unique to our kind.”

_Our kind._

The incantohad seen Simon’s mother persuasively, but not unkindly, walked out of his room, his door shut firmly behind her. If he let his mind wander, he remembered how close he’d been. How close she _still was._

Raphael sets the ‘dog’ down with a dismissive tap and levers himself from the dresser.

“You will learn it soon," he says, still not looking at him, and it gives Simon the moment to pull himself back together, or at least pretend that any of this could be okay. Unsurprisingly, it doesn't really work. Because it's not. It's not even slightly okay. "And more. For now, grab your things, change.” He gestures towards the still-open window. “We need to leave."

Simon scrubs his hands through his hair and doesn’t go anywhere. “Where.”

He’s being petulant. He has nowhere to go and he can’t stay here, he knows that.

Raphael expression tells him that yes, he’s caught the tone. “Come, or stay here and kill your family. It’s your choice.”

It’s not much of a choice.

 

-

 

“What do you remember of your turning?” Raphael asks, half-visible in the streetlights. He’s slouched with surprising ease into the passenger seat of Simon’s van, a knee kicked up and pressed against the dash. It’s a familiar move. Simon could wonder at the story behind it, if he cared.

The argument about taking Simon’s van had been heated and had lasted less than a minute. Immediate practicality and sentimentality won out, and thanks to Maureen, his guitar and amp were still in the back too.

“I remember playing a gig at a bar,” Simon says over the hum of the engine. The dark windows of the Brooklyn neighbourhood he grew up in flash by on either side. He wonders when he'll see it again. “Going to a club with my friends, you know, normal stuff, and then-"

He pauses, because he couldn’t really remember what happened _and then_.

He remembers cold eyes and a red, wide smile. Dark hair that poured over his fingers, like solidified shadow, like the entire evening was not quite real.

“A - woman,” he says, feeling the word in his mouth. It feels like he should be saying more than that, but what, he can’t remember. Somehow it's easier to focus on that, though, than the life he's leaving behind. “I remember a woman. But after that things get a bit fuzzy, like I was drunk, but I wasn’t, or at least not yet. And then there were fucking _monsters_.”

He remembers: a kind of chaos. Blurs of movement, and bizarre, unreal things like the kind you get in fever dreams but he’s not so sure they were anymore.

He feels more than sees Raphael's gaze on him.

“A woman?”

“Yeah," Simon changes gear, fingers tight around the gear stick. More of Brooklyn sloughs away. "Yeah, she had-” but he can’t really remember what she looks like, either.

“She had dark hair, I think?” he ends, lamely.

He expects - a snort or something. A kind of acknowledgement, or hell, even some answers, but Raphael only nods, and then turns back towards the window.

They drive in silence until they hit the bridge and what traffic there is thickens around it, the struts webbing dark overhead and scratching across the glow of Manhattan.

“The _monsters_ you saw,” Raphael says, at last. He doesn’t ask after the woman again. It's another thing Simon could wonder about. “They were demons. They prey on mundanes, when they can. You were unlucky.”

Simon nods, as if this makes complete sense, because after the night he's had, why wouldn't it. "Demons,” he repeats. “I was killed by a _demon_. Are - angels real too, then? Does ghh- guh-”

“God.” Raphael finishes for him. He says it slowly - not as if he’s savouring the word, but more like he’s careful to say it, affording it with a reverence, respect. And then he smiles, thinly, as if tickled by a private joke. “You will regain the ability in time.”

Simon forces himself to swallow, and then tries again regardless, working his tongue around the words. “Jehh- j- Yhh- gd- dammit, Allah. Allah.”

He chokes a laugh - there’s blood in his mouth again and his throat feels burnt. “Allah, I can say?”

Raphael’s smile gets an ironic tilt. He looks ethereal, back-lit by the approaching city. “Apparently it's a matter of personal faith.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is so late I'm so sorry - I've been stressed out over job interviews and travelling and I just couldn't find the time...! but this is a good length update right?? and as promised: all of the saphael interactions (slow burn peeps i live for it)


	3. Du Mort

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Not a vamp den without a death pun.

Hotel _Du Mort_ , Simon soon discovers, is every vampire den stereotype _imaginable_  thrown together. The vamoires of new york make their home in an art deco hotel. A gloriously delapidated, art deco hotel. There are impossible cracks in the façade's marble, the polished floors, and they all lead through the entrance halls and corridors to a set of doors padlocked and covered in symbols from every religion he recognises, and more from those he doesn’t.

Something awful happened here. Many awful things have, considering the residents, but there’s something else too, he thinks - the memory of it seems to linger in the air, steeped into the fabric of the building. Old blood and decay.

The vampires also fit every stereotype.

“So.” Simon starts, his first evening in the hotel, resisting the urge to tick off items on his fingers. They’re in one of the hotel’s less decrepit drawing rooms, ostensibly for some kind of vampire ‘orientation’: Raphael had showed him the facilities, where to avoid in the day to avoid getting fried, where his new room was, and then led him here. He’s yet to meet any of the other residents. He's okay with that. "Sunlight equals dead vampire. Faith is also a no-no. Well, my own. Can't enter a synagogue but churches are fine and dandy, great; no evoking of centuries of forced conversion there.” He does scrub at the back of his head then, spinning back to Raphael, where he sits impassively in the centre of the room in a high-backed chair. “Are there any atheist vampires here, then? Do they get to do whatever they want?"

Raphael sighs, in a way that, as he takes pains to remind Simon constantly, is functionally unnecessary. “Do you have any questions that aren't stupid?”

“Garlic,” Simon counters, powering on. “What about garlic? And onions? Are they related? Do I have to avoid the entire onion family now, or - I can’t even eat normal food anymore, can I?”

Raphael doesn’t even deign to answer. He fixes him with a flat look, ticking the foot resting on the opposite knee and yes, Simon’s being obnoxious, but he’s being this way because he feels _angry._ Anger is easier to hold onto. Anger is familiar; anger feels like living when suddenly you _aren’t._

“The silent treatment,” he deadpans. “Great. Really helpful, _amigo_. Pick that up this century, or the last?”

Something flickers across Raphael’s features - like impatience, or confusion, even, and then Raphael leans forward, hands crossing in his lap.

“Your stomach will repel anything that isn’t blood,” he says, to the point. “Garlic doesn’t affect us, and neither does disease. Narcotics will. It depends on the blood. It depends on the drug.” He tilts his head, and it’s eerie how he does that: how he blinks and doesn’t really breathe. “UV light will kill you. As will a stab through the heart. You will not age. You will not change.”

Simon strides across the ruined carpet and winds his fingers in his hair close to the scalp, pulling hard. “It’s like something out of Blade,” he says, and he means it to be funny but it comes out bitter. “Like Underworld - that stupid revolution movie - I’m a goon; a stupid, vampire goon.”

He doesn’t know what to do with that. He didn’t know what to do with Simon Lewis, and even then he had a model to follow: go to school; get the grades, miss the girl (the one he’d been in love with, the one he’d never see again) and finally become an accountant who dreamed about the music career he never had and got fat playing guitar hero until his 90s somewhere.

But that Simon Lewis is gone now. He doesn't know who he is, anymore.

He turns on his heel.

“You know who did this to me,” he says, pointing at Raphael in his high-backed chair. “You _have to know_ \- you were there, you practically _dug me up_ for, for crying out loud. Who was it?”

“I don’t know,” Raphael says, just as he did the first time Simon had asked.

Simon throws up his hands. If he was someone else he would've thrown something. “That’s a pile of crap!”

Raphael doesn't rise to the bait, staring him down until the silence presses like pinpricks against his skin.

“There was a demon attack,” Raphael says, when he deigns to do so. “You were found transitioning. I know nothing more.”

Simon points again, punctuating his words. “ _Found_ transitioning.I _was_ changed. Passive, not active - this was done to me! I didn’t have a choice!”

“We never do,” Raphael says, simply, and it’s undoubtedly true for him and undoubtedly true for all of them and Simon - doesn’t want to think about that right now.

He lowers his hands and then stalks out the room, opening the door too hard and ricocheting it off the wall with his new-found strength in his retreat to his bedroom.

Raphael doesn’t follow.

 

\--

 

Simon’s first few days at the ‘Hotel’ all seem to follow the same pattern. He wakes up jetlagged, too early for a vampire and too late for his old life, and then he stares up at the layers of mould on the ceiling. Sometimes he fiddles with his guitar, retuning it, although never quite willing to play. Eventually, he ventures out into the rest of the hotel.

He meets the other residents gradually: in the flickers of movement in the corner of his eye, in the individuals drifting through the common spaces. They drape themselves over the eclectic furniture and they talk, or they watch TV, or, in the distant reaches of the hotel, they play music: he hears the strains of a harp, a flute. The chords of a piano.

He never knows what to say, so he doesn’t stays long. Sometimes he feels their eyes on him - as if he’s a curiosity, as if he’s a child.

Raphael is simpler.

Simon shamelessly, spitefully, hunts him out, following that sense of stillness and growing things to his apartment in the upper floors of the hotel. The first time he’d managed it had been on his second day at the hotel - the first time he’d woken up to a place and life he didn’t recognise, from a sleep without dreams.

“I can’t stay here,” Simon’d said the moment the door had opened. “I won’t stay here.”

Raphael had raised an eyebrow, and then crossed his arms across his chest. He'd answered the door in a robe Simon hadn't seen him in before. It looked like it could be silk. “Then learn to control yourself."

And that was the other constant: the way his throat _always_ burned with the thirst.

“How do you do that?” Simon demanded, tightening his grip around his elbows. “How do I not tear my family apart, if I can’t _think_ about blood without fucking sprouting teeth-”

“You learn about yourself,” came the frank answer. “And through that you learn control. The more you practise, the easier it will be. Accept what has happened. Learn from it.”

Raphael had shifted on his feet then, a hand rising to the door.

“Now get off my doorstep.” 

(Nonetheless, later that day, when the sun had actually fallen and the rest of the hotel was waking up, Simon found himself outside his door again. Raphael let him in)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Short one, sorry - but hey progress! Been plotting like crazy; we should be seeing more familiar faces soon.


	4. Necessity

Simon sits in his room and stares at the carafe of blood waiting on his chest of drawers. It’s day number - he’s not even sure anymore, for it doesn’t really work as days, and each night blurs into the other. His head hurts. His throat burns.

Blood in wine glasses. A carafe of blood. It’s how they serve it in the ‘kitchens’ - as if sanitising it, civilising it, could change what it is - or maybe they’re not even trying, anymore. Maybe it just tickles them to pretend they’re drinking wine.

So all he had to do is just pretend, he tells himself. It’s a protein shake. Cranberry juice.

He doesn’t want to know what happens when he becomes like that again. If each time he loses himself, what comes back is that little bit different, that little bit changed.

After another long moment, he reaches for the glass.

He makes the mistake of taking a breath before he drinks.

 

\--

 

“Does it get - better?” he'd asked Raphael, perched on the arm of a chair in what he was told was Raphael’s parlor. There was electricity there, but only barely - the fat, waxy light of the bulbs seemed to stagnate in the dust, pooling in halos around the light shades. He'd shifted in his seat, tucking his feet beneath him in another one of those habits he didn’t really need anymore. He made himself follow the question through. “Does it change, this thirst - or do we?”

Raphael’s gaze cut towards him across the room, unreadable in the dim. "You are still a fledgling."

It's the answer he'd should've expected. It's the one he's been given hourly since he came to the hotel, whether he’s asked for it or not - but Raphael continued this time, turning towards the yellowed wallpaper of the false window.

“When you adjust to the change,” he'd said, “thirst becomes like anything else. Sleeping. Breathing.” His ironic smile at the last was a brighter slant in the shadow. “A controllable necessity. You make a choice: what you can live with, and what you cannot.”

“That answer is all that changes.”

 

\--

 

Simon comes back to himself with both hands wrapped around the carafe, blood dripping down his chin and down his neck the sticky-awful way fruit juice used to.

He tears the carafe away. He throws it for good measure, too, and it shatters against the wall, a few shards bouncing close enough to scratch his bare feet. There’s blood dripping off his chin, staining his shirt; blood rubbing dry beneath his collar. His body feels alien: his hands aren’t his hands, or his teeth, or his mouth, and he wraps his fingers in his hair and pulls until he doesn’t feel like screaming.

There’s a mirror over the sink at the far side of the room. He’s afraid of what he looks like, of what he’ll see - and it’s ironic that the one thing the myths got wrong is the exact thing that will let him see for himself what he’s become.

He stays there a little longer before he crouches down to pick up the glass, dumping it in an undignified pile in the corner of the room (alongside the abandoned wine glass) and then wrestling himself free from his sodden clothes.

He doesn’t turn around until he’s scraped as much of the drying blood from his skin as he can.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry, I've had this done for WEEKS but I was trying to integrate it into the next chapter... that didn't work. WE SEE CAMILLE IN THE NEXT SCENE I PROMISE and more vamps in general ;)
> 
> Also I finally have a job which means yay less stress! And more writing :D I say updating once a month but I'm adjusting to the schedule now ahahaha but soooooon


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